Page 4 of Hex House
Elly had spent plenty of time in the tangle of woodland that edged the village, but she knew that the woods themselves went on for miles, an unknowable, sprawling mass on the map. How long would she need to walk?Walk where?She didn’t dare answer that question. Elly wished she could have someone to spill it all into. She wished they’d understand her, believe her, without words.
She could go to her mum’s. Or Suzanne’s, just round the corner. But she couldn’t face their questions or opinions, their concerned expressions and soft words. She briefly considered a pub a few towns over, where no one would know her. They’d still be open. She could drink something fizzy and a stranger with a kind face might say something like,You look lost, are you alright?But she couldn’t do that in a wedding dress with bloody fingerprints on the bodice.
The hills rose up on her left, three of them in a row like a trio of sisters with their heads together, their unseen eyes watching her in the dark. She’d grown up in their shadow, had known their moss-slicked and rock-scarred faces since she was a little girl. She used to play hide and seek here with Suzanne, breath short in her throat, like something far worse than her friend were chasing her. All those boredafternoons, giggling about Hex House and mad witches in the windows, all the while believing there was nothing there to find. Elly felt it again, that awful tightening behind the knees, the prickling of the scalp – and stopped to look around. But there was nothing there but the night-time world, barely disturbed by her presence. Ahead, the trees grew thick and wild in the foothills, creating a long throat into the blackness, carving out places to hide. Elly didn’t give herself time to think. She let the woods swallow her up, and then she started to run.
***
It’s only now, after running so far and for so long, lungs throbbing and surrounded by tall birches and beeches, that Elly begins to panic. How did Ethan react when he realised she’d gone? The fear floods in quickly, like the sudden shock of waking up. She can’t understand why she’s out here, when her new husband is at the charming cottage he’s rented for them, worrying about her. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Of course he hadn’t. He’d looked horrified and guilty and now she’ll have made him feel even worse. Running away – it’s what children do. She’s married now. Married women stay.
The footpath has long since disappeared. Something squelches in Elly’s shoe, and she knows it’s blood. She’s come too far. She’s always lived in the countryside, in the rugged borders between places of note, but only now thinks how there is so much wilderness that she’s never even seen, wilderness that’s always been here while she lived a life of pavements and wine and engines turningover. She starts to hear things: pursuers, things with hunt in their heads.
A woman in the woods alone is never the beginning of a story. It’s usually the end.
Just keep going and don’t stop, the woman had said, but how much further? Elly forces the thought down somewhere deep. Of course, she isn’treallylooking for Hex House – that would mean she’s losing her mind, surely. She wonders for the first time whether Ethan has seriously hurt her, if it’s a hospital she really needs.The baby, she thinks.I need to think about the baby. As if in response, there’s a fluttering in her abdomen. She’s still getting used to this, the soft susurration of another body twisting inside her own. Elly tries to steady her breath and keeps walking. After a couple of minutes, she stumbles over a tree root and curses. She’s getting tired, clumsy. The truth is that she doesn’t know where she’s going, only that the things the woman in the bathroom said –You’re fightened of the man you just married. I think you’re right to be– changed something in her. Ethan smashing her head backwards into the cottage wallchangedsomething in her. Now, she doesn’t know how to change back.
The landscape no longer looks familiar. It’s getting colder. This is madness – she should turn around. Maybe it would be fine. She could tell Ethan that she’d needed some air after all the festivities, that was all. She could apologise and hope that he would accept it. She’d make cheese scones for breakfast in the morning, top them with salty slithers of bacon. They’d laugh about this tomorrow, golden butter dripping from their chins.
Elly turns and starts to walk back in the direction she’scome from, but she’s tired, so tired, and eventually she sits down on a patch of moss to rest. The woods seem to hold their breath, waiting to see what she might do next. She twists the wedding ring on her finger but doesn’t take it off. Her dress glows white in the gloom, creating a halo around her. She tries to think of it as a circle of protection, but it feels more like a beacon, making her vulnerable. Palms atop her belly, she wonders if she’s already a bad mother.
Nearby, things rustle and squirm. Raptors, toads, nightjars. The woods are never still. Elly can see her own breath making shapes in the twilight, a secret language. She eases off each heel and abandons them to the undergrowth, imagines them being swallowed up by the soil, then keeps walking.
How long does she walk? An hour, maybe two. She can’t stop thinking about cheese scones, about lemon meringue tarts. Surely, she’ll stumble onto a road soon. She shouldn’t hitchhike but maybe she would, just this once.
But no roads appear. There are only the woods – cold, dark, endless.
Just as she starts to feel desperate – really, truly, desperate – Elly becomes aware of a different sound, like air being sucked out of the hills. It’s all around her, inside her. Her heart beats hard in her chest, as though it’s trying to escape her body. Then, a soft tinkling noise, like silver bells beckoning, and something moving in the canopy overhead. She staggers backwards, breathless, her hands on her stomach.
When the tree falls it is sudden, but also slow – graceful, like a woman fainting. Breath hot in her throat, Elly watches it settle into the ground, its new resting place,gently rocking. Her eyes are drawn to what’s behind it, to something that wasn’t there before.
There’s a house.
It’s very large, and very old, its grand style somewhere between a farmhouse and a country manor. It’s surrounded by lush gardens of roses and wildflowers. Purple wisteria grows up its honey-stone walls, crowding around the leaded windows as if trying to find a way inside. The house has an irregular shape, the building folding and protruding like complicated origami, pocked with little terraces and clusters of chimney pots. It has a pointed gabled roof, and the front door is wide open, leaking light all over the path. It is incredible. It is impossible.
Elly watches and waits, shivering, her arms still wrapped around her belly. She has the curious feeling she’s being watched. She waits until a woman appears, as Elly had somehow known she would. The woman smiles and raises a hand.
“Would you like to come inside?” she asks.
NOW
Siobhan sits alone, drenched in the dark of the cinema. This darkness is a safe smother, its fullness pierced by the glow of the screen. She can breathe better in here, surrounded by so many warm bodies, than back at the flat where she never allows the bedside lamp to go out. Whatever happens on the cinema screen, the lights will always snap back on. Siobhan finds that more comforting than she should.
She’d slid into a row after her shift on the box office and cheered with everyone else as the velvet drapes drew back, like red lips framing a howling mouth. The Horror Film Festival at the Showroom always draws an eclectic crowd. All around Siobhan are stitched Frankenstein foreheads, vampire teeth shoved up into gums, faces splattered with fake gore. They jeer as terrified final girls run from pursuers and laugh throatily when first blood is spilled.
She scrapes her fingers around the bottom of a popcorn tub swiped from the concession stand, searching out theburnt bits, finding only whole kernels hard enough to crack a tooth. The film is Spanish, surreal, the debut of a young director with a fondness for showing the whites of eyes in close-up. The camera crawls through a Madrid apartment in a heatwave, its sun-bleached walls dripping as though swollen with sweat, balcony doors thrown open to a stifling city at dusk. The protagonist – a young woman with dirty feet and doll-like eyelashes – is safe, for now, having outrun her masked predator through the streets. She sits on the sofa with her knees drawn to her chest, watching the balcony doors. Should she shut them and just suffer the heat? Will he find her here?
There’s a violent burst of strings as a large black bird comes hurtling through the open apartment doors. The woman screams and the cinema screams with her, then guffaws almost confrontationally, fear pulled from underneath them like a rug. Siobhan’s hands are white-knuckled around the popcorn tub. The camera stays zoomed in on the bird, catching frenzied snatches of its beating wings, snapping beak, outstretched claws.
Siobhan closes her eyes. It’ll be over in a minute.
But she can still hear it: the panicked squawking of the bird as it circles the apartment, looking for an exit, the girl’s repeated screams in Spanish:Fuera! Fuera!Siobhan’s palms are clammy and her skin is starting to itch, hot and furious, as if it’s on the brink of rashing. She can still see those wings – veiny and fanned, like lungs turned inside out – on the back of her eyelids. She needs fresh air. She needs to get out.
Siobhan grabs her backpack and stands, knocking her popcorn bucket to the floor, and shimmies past the row ofseated knees without apologising. Their owners boo and twist their necks to see around her. Only one looks up as she makes it to the end of the row. Only one watches her with interest as she runs up the central aisle and bursts out of the screen door.
Siobhan takes a lungful of cool air. It’s almost too quiet out here after the boom of the cinema’s surround sound. Both screens are currently mid-movie, so she’s alone in the narrow corridor with its diamond-print carpet and vintage movie posters. She slumps against the wall, looking up at the image of Raquel Welch, perfectly poised beneath a pterodactyl in her scrappy bikini, and takes a bottle of wine from her backpack. The wine is warm, but since when has that stopped her? She drinks half of it in one go like she’s chugging a Diet Coke, suppressing a gag at the vinegary after-bite. The cheapest bottle always feels the best. The taste is like a punishment, the bitter hangover even more so. From inside the screen, there’s a billowing cheer. Siobhan grimaces. Maybe the murderer finally got in.
She’s taking a second swig when the screen door opens and someone comes out. She turns away and waits for them to pass, but they don’t, even though there’s plenty of room.
“Siobhan?” A familiar male voice makes her look back around. “I thought it was you.”
